The energy transition is reshaping the geography of resources, production, infrastructure and trade. Growing demand for critical raw materials is creating new centres of extraction and processing; clean-technology manufacturing is concentrating in some regions while expanding into others; and new energy and transport infrastructures are changing how technologies, materials and energy move across regions. These shifts are unfolding alongside geopolitical fragmentation, industrial policy, environmental constraints and growing concern over the resilience of global value chains.
This session invites research on the changing spatial and material foundations of the energy transition. We welcome contributions that:
examine critical raw materials, resource availability, extraction and processing;
investigate clean-technology manufacturing, innovation, deployment and shifting centres of production;
analyse renewable-energy, electricity, hydrogen, transport and other infrastructure associated with the transition;
study trade, logistics, supply-chain networks and changing patterns of global interdependence;
explore recycling, substitution, material efficiency and circularity;
examine how geopolitics, industrial policy, finance and strategies for diversification or domestic production reshape transition pathways; and
investigate how environmental burdens, economic opportunities, vulnerabilities and benefits are distributed across producing and consuming regions, workers and communities.
We particularly encourage studies that connect physical and technological change across these domains: how resource endowments influence industrial development; how manufacturing and infrastructure choices create new dependencies; how trade and policy reshape the location of production; and how strategies for resilience, security and circularity alter outcomes across regions.
By bringing together perspectives from geoscience, energy systems, industrial ecology, economics, geography and the social sciences, the session aims to build a more integrated understanding of how the geography of the energy transition is evolving, and what those changes imply for resilient, sustainable and equitable transition pathways.